1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to an optical information recording medium, an optical information recording apparatus, and an optical information recording method. The present invention can be suitably applied to, for example, an optical information recording medium in which information is recorded using a light beam and from which the information is reproduced using the light beam.
2. Description of the Related Art
Disc-shaped optical information recording media are in widespread use, and examples of such an optical information recording medium include a compact disc (CD), a digital versatile disc (DVD), and a Blu-ray Disc® (hereinafter referred to as BD).
An optical information recording/reproducing apparatus which uses the optical information recording medium records various kinds of information including various contents, such as music contents and video contents, and various data for use in a computer or the like in the optical information recording medium. Recently, the amount of information to be recorded has increased in accordance with the increase in the definition of video and sound quality of music. In addition, there has been a demand to increase the number of contents that can be recorded in a single optical information recording medium. Therefore, optical information recording media having larger capacities have been demanded.
To increase the capacity of an optical information recording medium, Japanese Unexamined Patent Application Publication No. 2005-37658 proposes an optical information recording medium which is made of a material capable of forming recording pits therein in response to two-photon absorption and in which information can be three-dimensionally recorded in a thickness direction by using a laser source with high peak power.